Meet our first 27,000 Web Summit attendees coming to Lisbon. So what?

Posted April 28, 2016. By Paddy Cosgrave

On this day last year, 1,317 attendees from 19 countries had booked their Web Summit tickets. A year later, and with 7 months to go until Lisbon, we’ve passed 27,000 attendees from 149 countries, all of whom as of today you can meet on our new attendee page.

Web Summit has hit one of those inflection points human gatherings sometimes hit.

When we started out Web Summit with 400 attendees five and half years ago, we never for one moment believed we would be where we are today.

For some, “Web Summit has become the most important and largest meeting place on our planet for those changing our planet most”, a sort of “Glastonbury for geeks” or “Davos for geeks”.

But Web Summit is no longer just an annual place of pilgrimage for “tech’s high priests” as the New York Times once described it. It is increasingly about all those impacted by technology converging in one place as well.

What started as a trickle of curious minds from outside of technology in 2014 has turned into a flood. That flood includes thousands upon thousands of leaders of innovative cities and established companies, policy makers and policy shapers, cultural creators and thought leaders.

They are flying to Web Summit this November because they want to be part of the conversation, and that conversation is about the future of our world and how technology is reshaping it.

We’re looking forward to announcing our first speakers soon. For now, we hope you enjoy a first glimpse at our 27,000+ attendees already joining us from 149 countries around the world this November.

We’ll continue to intermittently release batches of 1,000 tickets under our 2 for 1 program, before tickets go on general sale in June.